Despite concerns that requiring the reporting, by name, of people who test positive for HIV (and their partners) would discourage people from getting checked, that hasn’tÂ occurred,Â according to reportby the state Health Department’s AIDsÂ Institute.

The study, involving interviews with more than 700 people, many of them in bars, found that among high risk individuals,Â knowledge of the law was limited, with about one in four people aware thatÂ names ofÂ HIV-positive peopleÂ are reported to the state Health Department. And only five percent said it wasÂ enough of a concernÂ to not get tested.

The reporting law took effect in 2000; prior to that, reporting was required only for AIDs cases, which, the state notes, can take an average of ten years to develop after an HIV infection. That meant, for example, that when the state looked for infection patterns, it was looking at what happened roughtly a decade earlier.

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